Film Watching Danny Boyle's Sunshine was an odd experience because unlike my latter spoilerphobic ways, I'd been following the production of the film through the blog on the official website written by Gia Milinovich. Here she is sneaking onto the airlock set early in filming. Produced at a time when blogs were still in their imperious stage, just before more Facebook, Twitter and other social media came along and burnt it all down (where this is posted surely but smouldering embers), it struck a balance between teasing story elements, investigating the science (including videoed talks with her husband Dr Brian Cox who was the science advisor on the film) and glimpses of the production. It's all here and here. Gia offers some general memories about the experience here.
What was odd was that even after all of that reading, sitting in front of the giant screen at, I think, Picturehouse at FACT Screen Two, everything fell away. Much like Soderbergh's remake of Solaris a few years before and Gravity a few years later, once the luminous, awe inspiring mass of the celestial body filled the screen, I entirely forgot that I was watching a fictional construct (almost), my suspension of disbelief fully engaged. That's usually how I know I'm enjoying a film. My liberal arts knowledge about genre and editing and narrative and stars and all of that, my critical stance, disappear (usually - sometimes I'll grow to love film because of those things, that it knows that I know and so does something amazing because of that).
None of which stopped me from writing a review of this film for this blog in which I singled out Chris Evans as a "mega star in waiting" but as I noticed there hadn't been many films in that period about "giant ships flying through deep space on the big screen without a Jedi or Vulcan piloting them" (last year MARVEL produced huge blockbusters so I was already predicting the success of the MCU a year before the release of Iron Man). It is a film which has grown in stature across time and along with Moon and the afformened Solaris and Gravity demonstrate that intelligent, or at the very least meditative science fiction is still being made (I'd also add The Last Days on Mars but no one saw that). Certainly there aren't many films of this ilk which could provide enough material for an hour long discussion like this:
My dvd copy of Sunshine was bought at the old Zavvi shop at Liverpool One just before it transmuted into Head then closed anyway. Watching it again that evening on a smaller screen (well small than cinema) did little to diminish its power and indeed increased it as often happens when you know the fate of characters, the mundane moments before disaster strikes given extra poignancy because you now have knowledge about their lives that isn't available to you with your unpredictable future. Ignoring the disaster element of that sentence, that's also why production blogs like Gia's are still compelling. After having seen the film, it's a way of looking back to a time when outcomes were uncertain, when we didn't know what the results would be. I wonder what Gia thinks about her blog now.
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